This dude has figured out how to revive a neighborhood and eventually a city.......through their stomachs. While the monied folks laugh and hold their noses, this guy is going to clean up.
Detroit’s Renewal, Slow-Cooked
HOW much good can a restaurant do?
In this city, a much-heralded emblem of industrial-age decline, and home to a cripplingly bad economy, a troubled school system, racial segregation and sometimes unheeded crime, there is one place where most everyone — black, white, poor, rich, urban, not — will invariably recommend you eat: Slows Bar B Q.
Slows opened in 2005 at the edge of downtown Detroit, in Corktown, across from the long-abandoned central train station, itself a symbol of widespread blight. Hidden behind a stylish wooden door with no discernible handle, it has become a beacon, drawing longtime Detroiters, newly arrived young people and scores of suburbanites, who wait for hours to sample the pulled pork and dry-smoked ribs and coo over the upcycled design. The restaurant and its sleek décor were dreamed up by one of Slows’ owners, Phillip Cooley, who has emerged as a de facto spokesman for the now-hip revitalization of this city.
“Before Slows was built, generally speaking people came into the city for hockey games, ball games and to see the ‘Sesame Street Spectacular,’ ” said Toby Barlow, Detroit’s other de facto spokesman. Mr. Cooley, he said, has “validated the idea that people will come into the city.”
Anywhere but Detroit, the notion that people will show up and pay money for barbecue and beer would not be seen as revolutionary. But destination restaurants are still rare enough inside the city limits that Slows was a notable success. Few have taken it as an exact blueprint — the mix of things that make it work are hard to copy — but it has helped change the reputation of a city where a night on the town used to offer mostly the wrong kind of thrills.
To make sure the positive change takes hold, Mr. Cooley has parlayed the good will of his barbecue joint into a restless pursuit of community-building. He advises other business owners on everything from liquor licenses to using salvaged lumber. Most people in Detroit who are involved in food — or art, or music, or night life, or civic service — have brushed up against him at some point, a function both of how involved he is and how interconnected the city is.
Also: “You’re not going to talk about how cute he is, are you?” Mr. Barlow said, teasing.
Well, not exactly, but it’s not lost on anyone that Mr. Cooley, 32, used to be a fashion model, walking European runways for the likes of Louis Vuitton before returning home to Michigan at 24.
“He’s a pretty idiosyncratic character,” said Mr. Barlow, an author and ad agency executive. “He’s like a living Venn diagram, he’s got a lot of circles that are colliding around him.” (Mr. Barlow among them: he is working with Mr. Cooley on a new restaurant in a former pawn shop.)
Mayor Dave Bing appointed him to be a chairman of his Detroit Works Project, a major initiative to map the future of the city. It is one of a half-dozen boards that Mr. Cooley serves on, including the Greening of Detroit and the A.C.L.U. of Southeastern Michigan. The scale of his activity as a restaurateur-turned-do-gooder would be rare anywhere, but it particularly stands out here.
“Phil doesn’t give lip service to getting involved in challenges,” Mayor Bing said through a spokesman. “He is out there getting his hands dirty and working to make changes.”
Mr. Cooley, the son of a prominent real estate developer and city council member in Marysville, Mich., a lakefront town of about 10,000 that’s an hour from Detroit, has an exalted indie lifestyle and mainstream clout. He goes to several events a night. “I’m needed here,” he said. “It’s rewarding, the day-to-day work that I do. I wake up and I feel like I’m making a difference.”
In Detroit, he added, “I could get involved and not be judged by my age.” He was driving from Slows to the site of Slows to Go, a catering and take-out outpost that he and his partners — who include his father, Ron, and brother, Ryan — are opening in the coming weeks. “This is an incredibly fruitful place to do business, because we’re so starving for anything,” he said.
Rent is cheap here, but spaces in good condition are hard to find. So are investors, which is why entrepreneurs often double as carpenters. With his parents as co-signers on the leases for two buildings totaling $159,000, and the chef and sous-chef as sweat-equity partners, Mr. Cooley opened Slows using an advance on his inheritance, helping to refurbish the space himself.
“We were going to do fine dining,” he said, “and we looked around the neighborhood and said, ‘What the hell are we thinking?’ ” Barbecue was an affordable, populist option.
“Slows was almost a zeitgeist thing,” said Todd Abrams, a restaurant critic for the Metro Times, a local weekly, and the founder of Gourmet Underground Detroit, a dining and drinking club. “They came into that neighborhood at a time when it really needed it. I’m there probably once every other week, if not more.”
In its first year, Slows did $1.8 million in sales, triple what the owners expected, Mr. Cooley said. And now they are eager to spread their wealth.
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